Man Goes on Trial Today in Attack on Girl : Crime: The racial aspect raised by Amber Jefferson’s family and some activists will be missing.

The trial of a Stanton man accused of throwing a piece of glass that disfigured 15-year-old Amber Jefferson in a brawl four months ago gets under way today in Superior Court.

Kurt David Wimberly, 18, stands accused of felony mayhem in connection with the Aug. 6 fight that left the Garden Grove cheerleader with a scar down the left side of her face. If convicted, Wimberly could face up to nine years in prison.

When the trial gets under way, it will be just one of dozens of criminal matters heard in the courthouse in the coming weeks. And as in other assault cases, jurors will examine evidence and listen to testimony in an effort to piece together what really happened.

But what will not be explored in the Wimberly trial are the allegations that elevated the case to a cause celebre for many minority activists--charges by Amber and her family that the teen-ager was attacked because she is black.

Prosecutors say that was a false claim that diverted attention from what really happened. While no one disputes the severity of Amber’s injuries, prosecutors believe the tragic case held up by some civil rights activists as a classic example of a racially inspired hate crime was, in fact, nothing more than the result of an argument between two white girls that escalated into violence.

Initially, Amber, the daughter of a white mother and black father, said that a group of white men with baseball bats had called her “nigger” and then attacked her. Civil rights activists, supported by some Hollywood personalities, rallied to her support, charging that the incident was yet another example of the racism that pervades predominantly white Orange County.

But four months later, a different picture has emerged from Sheriff’s Department reports and testimony during a pretrial hearing for Wimberly. Although Amber and her friends initially maintained that they had been attacked after returning from a short trip to a store for snacks and sodas, Amber testified in court that they were on their way back from a night of partying and had consumed alcohol.

More damaging to Amber’s claims that she was the victim of a hate crime was testimony from Matt Stewart, 18, one of Amber’s friends who was with her that night. He testified that Amber had urged him to claim that the incident was racially motivated so they each could make $1,000, a charge that Amber has angrily denounced as a lie.

According to an Aug. 28 Sheriff’s Department press release, the trouble started the night before Amber was injured at the Stanton apartment complex where Wimberly lives. There, one of Amber’s friends, 15-year-old Michelle Schimmer, and Colleen Gallagher, 19, got into a heated argument. Amber was present during the confrontation between the two girls--each flanked by a group of friends, some of whom were armed with bats and sticks. Sheriffs’ investigators said the situation was temporarily defused by some of the participants.

But the next night, according to investigators, Michelle, Wimberly’s former girlfriend, Amber and some male friends went to the Stanton apartment complex. There, they confronted Gallagher, Wimberly’s current girlfriend.

Soon Wimberly, his father, Earl Wimberly, and several others from the night before--some armed with bats--approached the two girls. When Michelle was also joined by some of her male friends, two youths from the opposing groups began struggling over a bat. A brawl ensued, with one side using boards and the other using bats, investigators said.

According to court testimony, one of Amber’s companions, who was armed with a stick, chased Wimberly into his apartment and began breaking windows. It was then, prosecutors charge, that Wimberly retaliated by throwing an ashtray, a knife and then a piece of glass from his porch, striking Amber.

Sheriff’s homicide investigator Rudy Garcia testified that Amber suffered a bone-deep cut that fractured several bones and severed all of the nerves in the left side of her face. After 10 hours of surgery to close the wound, her doctors predicted that she would suffer some permanent paralysis and would require plastic surgery, Garcia said.

Because of the severity of the injury, the district attorney’s office decided to file felony mayhem charges against Wimberly. But at the same time, they dismissed claims that the incident was racially motivated and refused to press additional hate-crimes charges. While some slurs may have been used after the fighting broke out, prosecutors said, the fight started from a disagreement between two white girls.

At least part of the reason that the incident snowballed, some community leaders said, was the slowness of the Sheriff’s Department to release details on what happened.

Investigators did not publicly comment on the case until four days after the fight, and then steadfastly refused to acknowledge any racial implications. Further, it was not until a month later that sheriff’s investigators recommended to the district attorney that assault charges be filed in the case. Jefferson family members claimed that this lent credence to their complaints that the department was not aggressively investigating the crime.

Assistant Sheriff Dennis LaDucer acknowledges that officials made mistakes in their initial handling of the case--errors specifically in public relations that he attributes to investigators’ inexperience in dealing with hate crimes. As an outgrowth of the Jefferson incident, he said, the department recently drafted new guidelines outlining procedures for handling crimes that appear to be motivated by race, religion or sexual orientation.

“I think they (investigators) completely discounted the fact that there were racial overtones and what that could mean in terms of the perception the public would have, instead of saying, ‘Gee, we don’t know, we’ll look into that,’ ” LaDucer said. “That’s what got us into trouble.”